Mud Magic Client

Need a little help here on the compile of the program mudmagic-1.9.tar.gz. The configure script doe snot work at all on my Distro. It complains that i do not have Python 2.2 or higher. Well - as shown below i have Python 2.5 installed ( please see below ).
Any Suggestions?

# cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.6.18.8-0.1-default (geeko@buildhost) (gcc version 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (SUSE Linux)) #1 SMP Fri Mar 2 13:51:59 UTC 2007

Both KDE and Gnome are installed.

~/mudmagic-1.9 # ./configure
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking for gawk... gawk
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes
checking for gcc... gcc
checking for C compiler default output file name... a.out
checking whether the C compiler works... yes
checking whether we are cross compiling... no
checking for suffix of executables...
checking for suffix of object files... o
checking whether we are using the GNU C compiler... yes
..........<SNIP>..........
checking for g77 option to produce PIC... -fPIC
checking if g77 PIC flag -fPIC works... yes
checking if g77 static flag -static works... yes
checking if g77 supports -c -o file.o... yes
checking whether the g77 linker (/usr/i586-suse-linux/bin/ld) supports shared libraries... yes
checking dynamic linker characteristics... GNU/Linux ld.so
checking how to hardcode library paths into programs... immediate
checking for gtk+ 2.8 API... found
configure: error: *** Python version 2.2 or later not found!
~/mudmagic-1.9 # python --version
Python 2.5